Archives for June, 2008

Some readers are skeptical of global warming and we sometimes get hit and run types who want to declare the threat of a pandemic a hoax cooked up by Donald Rumsfeld to make money on Tamiflu. Since I want everyone to feel welcome here, this is for you guys: petit pas from mapo_mapos on Vimeo

If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the…

Crof, over at H5N1, has an important piece on Indonesia that is worth thinking about. He observes something that lots of us haven’t paid attention to: Indonesia hasn’t been notifying the UN agency on animal health, the OIE, about bird flu outbreaks in poultry for almost two years:

You know any post that starts out . . . Gerardo Castillo, 30 years old, had worked at the Blommer Chocolate Co. for 9 years. His family wanted him to quite ever since an explosion in a roaster killed a fellow worker and injured another. He was fearful himself, but he stayed on . .…

It was a sixties-style wedding, only 20 people including the Baptist minister and the bride and groom. I was there with my friend. The guests were all family except for three close friends of the couple and the officiating Minister, chosen because his church was rent-free home for innumerable political groups — and he had…

Last fall the animal slaughter giant Tyson Foods, Inc. was selling chickens with a USDA approved label, “raised without antibiotics.” Some people thought that was a bit misleading insofar as Tyson routinely used ionophores in their feed designed to prevent a fungal disease in the birds. The USDA classes ionophores as antibiotics. The agency had…

The controversy over the health of rescue workers at the World Trade Center site goes on. The Wall Street area was re-opened quickly after 9/11 despite EPA air tests that showed hazardous materials in the air by direct orders from Condeleeza Rice’s office when she was National Security advisor to George Bush. High asbestos levels…

We do a lot of Christian baiting here. Admittedly the tendency of many Christians to make lampooning easy is a factor. But we need to give other religions a chance, too. So we bring you now Richard Dawkins pwning an orthodox rabbi. What I particularly like about this is the way Dawkins highlights the fundamental…

Like most public health scientists I am fascinated by the complicated relationship between the environment and disease. You build a military base somewhere and sexually transmitted diseases follow. You build a dam in Egypt and urinary schistosomiasis, a chronic debilitating disease that also predisposes to bladder cancer, entrenches itself in an area because infected workers…

The Indonesian Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has figured out how to deal with her country’s reputation as being the bird flu capital of the world. She isn’t going to announce deaths from the disease as they happen: